So....still continuing with my mother's life story....and mine...

Here's Dave, standing by the birdbath in my mother's back yard on Mound Avenue in Cedar Rapids. My dad was still alive at this point, but as he approached his later 70s, he became more and more ready to just sit in his chair, listen or watch baseball and football on television/radio, and let the rest of the world go by... But, we visited fairly often, so the kids were used to spending time at Grandma and Grandpa's....

The boys loved playing with their trucks and other machines... here in the back yard on West 7th Street in Cedar Falls.

And...here's Dave....on the glider in the back yard. We must be going to paint the house, 'cause there's the ladder by the garage...

Diane looks like she is enjoying 'keeping the tether ball away from Dave....' Sometimes, it's tough being the youngest...until you get bigger!

Just too much fun...it gets a kid exhausted! 

Here's Dave coming down the slide, with Doug and Diane waiting to catch him at the bottom. Doug seems quite anxious to see him safe. This probably reminds him of the accident he and Diane had on a slide when they were younger. Doug climbed up the steps of a tall slide at a park we had gone to, and Diane started up after him. She was about 2 years old, and was wearing a scarf on her head at the time (this is significant because of what happened next...) Well, Doug got a bit frightened about going down that big slide by himself, so he turned around (not such a good idea...) and thought he would just walk right down the steps, but instead he fell. Luckily for him, Diane was part-way up the steps and stopped his fall, but her feet caught between two steps and she flipped backward and hit her head hard on the edge of a lower step. I ran to them, helped Doug to his feet, and picked up Diane. I realized that the back of her head was wet, and then realized that it was blood. Oh, my...I sort of panicked, since there was so much blood, and I didn't know that head wounds bleed profusely. We got into the car, rushed to Sartori Hospital's emergency room, and got treated right away. It turned out that the cut was about 1 inch wide at the base of Diane's head, and was just a cut into her scalp...not any injury to her neck, like I had feared. She got a few stitches, and we went home to nurse her wounds and get some quiet time... She fell asleep soon afterward, but we watched her closely and made sure she did not have a concussion. She recovered quickly, as kids seem to do, and we did go back onto slides again. But, I'm sure, as you can see in this photo, Doug is being very certain that Dave doesn't fall...

I'm not sure that Fritzi is enjoying all this attention, but he never did bite any of our kids. He really just became way too protective of our house, in general.